When we open ourselves to the voices of the more-than-human world, this is always the result: a breaching and collapsing of the established borders of thought and feeling.

When we rely deeply on other lives, there is urgency to protect them.

As the American ecologist Aldo Leopold deftly put it, we need to transform the way we see ourselves, ‘from conqueror of the land-community to plain member and citizen of it’.41 Thanks to forty years of Earth-system research, we have a rapidly improving scientific understanding of how the Holocene epoch – with its stable climate, ample fresh water,